The African wanderer

White House regular Witney Schneidman was hired by Covington & Burling in 2012 to drive the firm’s activity in Africa. A new scramble has now hit the continent – to propel business from abroad into Africa.

Long before treading the political path that included posts at the World Bank, the US State Department and on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Schneidman was an 18 year-old not yet ready for college. His sense of adventure led him to a Kibbutz in Israel, a collective community that tended to the land around it and shared the produce between them.

Six months in, and not ready to return to his home town of Philadelphia, another bout of wanderlust struck. “When I was in the Kibbutz, I met these American kids that had grown up in Kenya,” he says. “Their talk of game parks and hippo pools captured my imagination.”

Schneidman sat for hours in the Kibbutz library, poring over maps and atlases to find a route to Kenya before heading back to the US. While his friends at home were studying by day and listening to Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles by night, he witnessed some of the continent’s most monumental days, with colonial chains being ripped off by youthful leaders promising better days.

From a Kenyan youth hostel in late 1970, Schneidman grabbed a handful of belongings and hitch-hiked to Uganda.

“Idi Amin took over the country when I was there. I heard him introduce himself on the radio as ‘Field Marshal Idi Amin’, announcing he’d liberated Uganda from all evil and imperial forces and that the borders were closed until further notice,” he says.

“I was in Mbrara, Western Uganda, and the mood was incredibly celebratory,” he adds. “He had deposed President Milton Obote who was in Singapore at a commonwealth leaders’ conference. So it was a very peaceful coup. All he had to do was seize the airport, the state radio and the presidential office. Since he was head of the military, there was no push back.”

FALSE DAWNS

Amin, like many African leaders of that period, arrived with rhetoric and promise but soon turned democracy into dictatorship. Once he reopened the borders, a week later, Schneidman took the boat from Kenya to India, before travelling through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Holland and the UK, his final stop before heading home.

Boasting a tan and a tonne of stories, the trip put Schneidman’s career plans in concrete. He explains: “Having seen the politics out on the street, meeting the people and encountering issues of the young nations just being born in Africa, which were still struggling for their independence, I said to myself: ‘I want to run my country’s policy towards Africa’.”

The liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique in southern Africa and the transition to independence of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in eastern African shaped his studies.

Schneidman reached a new set of crossroads on completing university, feeling that something was missing. Knowing what he wanted to do with his career, the future diplomat nonetheless felt that he didn’t yet know enough about Africa, with most of his studies in the US having come from independent learning.

He chose to enroll in a Master’s programme in Tanzania, which was at the time led by socialist leader Julius Nyerere. Schneidman was inspired by the country’s first president since achieving independence due to his “whole approach to development”, which included collectivisation of the country's agricultural system, and his support of the ANC in South Africa, which was waging war against the apartheid system.

“I wanted to learn about Africa, with Africa, from Africans,” he says.

Schneidman’s arrival in Tanzania’s largest and richest city, Dar es Salaam, in 1976 coincided with the Soweto Uprising in South Africa. The city’s university became a safe haven for South African students during the course of the academic year and Dar es Salaam became a hub for political visits too, with Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Indian president Indira Gandhi and US secretary of state Henry Kissinger all coming through. He graduated with a masters in international relations in 1977 and returned to the US with ambitions of shaping US policy towards Africa.

After writing a PhD in California, Schneidman quickly landed a job as an analyst at the US State Department, where he analysed the beginning of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. Had Schneidman’s Tanzanian education, supplemented by nights in local clubs where his guitar would blend with the sounds of east African horns, molded a more progressive mind-set towards Africa than his colleagues at his first job?

“The Cold War had led many people to see the world in the context of East versus West and capitalism versus communism,” he says. “People that had spent a lot of time in Africa were saying that communism isn’t as influential and bad as it seems, and that liberation movements are passionate nationalist organisations that just happen to have the support of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists because we won’t support them.”

Unhappy at not being able to shape policy at the state department, Schneidman departed for the World Bank after two years in government. A decade of consultancy work ensued, after which he joined the Clinton Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, where he led the charge to introduce the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

PUTTING PEN TO LEGISLATION

Working in the Clinton Administration, which hoped to boost African exports to the US, he became “a point person in the executive branch to convey support for this legislation”. While there were initial concerns in some quarters that the Bill would undermine US jobs, strong opposition never emerged on Capitol Hill.

Schneidman’s plan for African integration into the world economy nonetheless hit the skids when, during a joint press conference in 1998 between President Clinton and President Mandela in Cape Town, the late ANC leader came out in opposition to the AGOA. “That was a real problem, as you can imagine,” he says.

The Bill, which granted South Africa and other African countries trade concessions, went back to the drawing board in Washington, DC. Because the US government hadn’t built up a relationship with the ANC, Schneidman went on a charm offensive to sell the plan to Africa. After three years in and out of the White House, the AGOA was accepted by all African ambassadors and signed into American law on 18 May 2000.

President Obama recently vowed to renew the AGOA, which conservative estimates report has helped to boost African supply of non-oil exports to the US by 10%.

Yet Schneidman, who was co-chairman of African strategy for the Obama White House campaign and a member of the presidential transition team, was left disappointed by Obama’s lack of activity on Africa during his first four-year term.

He nonetheless says that since the president’s visit to Africa last year, Obama has returned with renewed enthusiasm for the continent, spearheading a number of initiatives, including Power Africa, Feed the Future and the Young African Leaders Initiative.

COMING OF AGE

Schneidman, now at Washington, DC-headquartered Covington & Burling, is actively involved with Microsoft’s participation in the Young African Leaders Initiative and the company’s own project, 4Afrika, which promotes innovation across the continent.

Much of the continent has hit the economic accelerator pedal in recent years; the IMF expects growth in sub-Saharan Africa to continue at a similar pace, estimating regional growth of 5.25% in 2014.

“The biggest challenge to the Africa rising narrative is that subsectors and geographical regions are not part of Africa’s rise,” says Schneidman. “People have stopped getting poorer on the continent, but they’re not coming out of absolute poverty as fast as needs to occur. The challenge is how we engage people who don’t have the skills, who haven’t moved to the cities, who are still farming with ancient equipment.”

As a member of Covington & Burling’s ‘law plus’ service, which looks to not only advise on legal issues but aid business itself, Schneidman praises African states for pulling back and not trying to run all the different dimensions of the economy.

Transporting goods and services across borders rapidly remains problematic, however. “The regulatory environment is very much a work in progress,” says Schneidman, whose work at Covington often involves heavy lifting behind the scenes, given his knowledge of the continent and large contacts book.

Following the lead of accountancy firms like PwC and EY, which have diversified their services to provide more legal and consultancy offerings, the playmaker role enjoyed by Schneidman is becoming increasingly common at law firms. “Non-lawyers can come into this environment and offer a different skill-set to the clients,” he says.

By way of example, Schneidman recalls a situation in which a Covington client was struggling to get the attention of the opposing party in a legal dispute. “I was able to work through my contacts to convey to people that the client was serious about solving the issue,” he says. “They understood that concern was coming from the highest levels of government. That diplomatic approach unblocked a log jam and created the level of trust needed to settle the disagreement.”

BAKGAT

Because Covington & Burling is yet to establish an office in Africa, Schneidman is searching for the continent’s best lawyers to assist his firm and its clients.

The White House will host the first US-Africa Leaders’ Summit in Washington, DC in August. It is the first event of its kind, which Schneidman says will tighten ties between the continent and the US.

Forty-four years have passed since his first visit to Africa, which inspired a life spent integrating its businesses into the world economy. And, as Schneidman himself notes, if he’d have been more decisive as a teenager, a lot less would have been achieved.

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